Until Death (2 page)

She nodded, but with every step down the narrow stairs her courage dimmed like a torch with a fading battery. Asking Christos for a divorce was a risk. But maybe now she knew he had a mistress, had Sylvie Lockhart to distract him, she could slip away. He spent twelve hours a day with the bottle blonde. She had short hair that tended to the spiky, like her character, and a big laugh. She wore high heels and patent belts, preferred loud colours and fashion extras that served no purpose such as zips on sleeves and bows on shoulders. Kelly suspected the American accent was emphasised to make her stand out, to be heard and seen. She was the complete opposite of herself, and that made the hurt lance her anew – Christos hadn’t chosen a lover who was anything like his wife.

She stepped off the kerb of the Euston Road and heard the squeal of brakes, the siren of a horn and felt the wind caress her cheek as air was shoved aside by a heavy object inches away. A bus was silently coasting down the inside lane, a row of blank city faces staring out at her. She sharply told herself to get a grip and walked along until she could cross the road at the lights. Adrenalin fluttered through her body, mixing with the shame, the defeat, the anger. But none of these emotions was stronger than the fear.

S
he walked past a couple hand in hand outside the St Pancras Hotel, enjoying London on a loved-up city break. She looked away and headed down a side road past the brutalist British Library to a discreet smoked-glass door. The drill of large machinery competed with the hum of traffic. The whole area was being rebuilt and redeveloped into something shiny and new. The contrast to her rotting marriage was not lost on her.

She walked past a concierge who nodded coldly at her. Such was her level of paranoia about her husband she wondered if he was paid to spy on her, whether this man too had Christos as a boss. She rode up in the lift to their dedicated floor under the roof, to the flat he had chosen and despite her disagreement had bought anyway.

She walked into the bedroom off the corridor near the lift, saw his suit in its dry-cleaning wrapper on the bed. She hung it in the wardrobe. Christos liked things in the right places, he demanded order and routine. She caught sight of herself in her drab black outfit in the wardrobe mirror. It was as if the colour had leached out of her life with every year of her marriage. She tried to anticipate what he would do, how he would react when she told him, and she felt sick to her stomach. It seemed impossible that he would walk out of the house he loved, so she busied herself in packing a bag in case it got ugly, threw some clothes of hers and the kids’ in. They might be leaving in a hurry.

She collected the kids from school, made a meal for them, watched them with a forensic eye. Change was upon them, but they were loved, they would adapt. They’d have to. She felt her heart soar with the possibility of being with them without her husband, how light that would feel, how free. And then she heard the lift doors opening and her husband walking up the wide curving staircase from the corridor below, the heels on his hard-soled shoes clicking across the marble of the living room floor and into the kitchen. The colours of the day dulled, the air seemed colder. Her shoulders tensed.

Yannis heard him coming, got down from the table and ran to give his dad a hug. Florence stayed where she was. He roughhoused his son for a while, picked him up and pretended to throw him across the room, which made Kelly flinch, anticipating an imaginary impact. He put Yannis back on his feet and came over to her, shoved a hand up the back of her skirt and pinched her arse. ‘You look like a real slut in that. Where have you been today?’

She murmured something to him about language in front of the kids and moved away down the kitchen to put a plate in a cupboard. He stared at her, the dimples in his cheeks visible now. ‘I’m starving. Why can’t you make beef stew like my mum makes it? Eh, Yannis, why can’t your mum cook beef?’ He turned back to her. ‘Have we got a T-bone in this bloody fridge? I want it with peas, not salad.’ He thumped the kitchen counter with his palm and picked up his phone.

Half an hour later Christos was sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, sawing his steak into squares. Christos liked his table laid a certain way, with a placemat and a napkin in a ring, too many different types of glassware and classical music’s greatest hits on low, as if a TV crew were about to arrive and start filming the perfect family dinner. He was picky and precise and chewed his food carefully, spearing his peas with the sharp tines of his fork so that each one burst, sending a tiny squirt of liquid across the plate. The scrape of metal on china made her spine jump unpleasantly. The children were downstairs in the den next to the main bedroom, watching telly.

‘If you’ve got something to say, say it.’ He could always anticipate what she was thinking. He tended to be one step ahead of her. Back in the early days she had been enthralled by that, now it was one item on the long list of things she didn’t like. He put his knife and fork together, wiped his mouth carefully with his napkin and sat back, his hands gripping the table as if he were readying himself for a bar fight.

She listened for the kids, couldn’t hear them. She took a deep breath, teetered on the edge of an emotional precipice and threw herself off. ‘I know about Sylvie. I know you’re having an affair.’

He didn’t reply, but stood up, calmly moved his chair back and walked across to the percolator. ‘Do you want coffee?’ He hadn’t even acknowledged what she’d said.

‘No, I don’t,’ she snapped. ‘I want a divorce.’

He turned round with a small china cup in his hand and sat down again. The cup made a small cracking sound as he placed it on the slate table. He picked up a sugar cube with the silver tongs from the bowl on the table and put it on his tongue, waited a few moments for it to begin to dissolve and then chased it down with a large gulp of coffee. He didn’t take his eyes off her. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I want a divorce.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

His dismissive tone was making the anger swell in her. ‘You’re cheating on me with another woman.’

He tossed the cup back down on the table where it cracked in two. He didn’t even flinch. ‘You married me, you’ll learn to make a life with me.’

A dying relationship was like cancer, she decided. The rot started slowly, hollowing you out and then it took over everything that used to give you pleasure, robbed you of your peace of mind, your happiness, the person you used to be. Christos’s hair was dark and thick, he had long eyelashes like a child and skin that turned walnut brown in the sun. Once, she had thought him handsome, courageous and exciting. Now she just hated his guts.

‘This is very simple. I’ve given you whatever you wanted. You’re my wife and you’re staying my wife.’

‘We can come to an arrangement that suits everybody. The kids will be OK. They want to see their parents happy—’

‘You think this is about being contented? Do I look like I’m joyful?’

‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’ And at that moment she really meant it.

‘You’re not leaving this marriage. You can’t and I won’t let you.’

‘It will take some time to sink in—’

‘I picked you and your daughter up from the gutter, gave you a roof and a life and opportunities, gave you that studio where you work, sitting pretty here with a view of London. Love doesn’t pay the bills, Kelly, my grafting twelve hours a day does.’

‘Please, Christos, don’t make this into a financial battle. Let’s try to salvage something for the kids. We don’t have to let our failure be theirs.’

Now he got angry, fists opening and closing, a flush across his face. ‘Failure? I won’t even hear that word in this house. What’s success, Kelly? I’ll tell you what it is, it’s an image I work very hard at. You think I can go into meetings looking like a pussy who can’t control his wife? If I can’t keep you in line, how can I run a successful business?’

She could feel the stopper on her rage beginning to loosen. ‘I am not something you own! You don’t control me!’

He got up from the table so fast he knocked the chair to the floor behind him. He walked away into the laundry room, a doorway leading off the kitchen where the bleach was stacked and the ironing board erected once a week by the cleaner or his mother. Kelly followed him in. They were far from the kids here, their marital mess wouldn’t be heard.

He bent over and plugged in the iron, slammed it down on the board.

‘What are you doing?’

He ignored her. ‘You have to understand how this works, fast. If you try to leave me, I’ll make sure you never see the kids again.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘I always do what I say I’m going to do.’

The stopper blasted off her anger and she screamed at him now. ‘How dare you even say that aloud!’

‘Those kids are never leaving me and neither are you.’

‘You can’t stop me.’

‘Try me. Nothing is impossible, Kelly.’

‘I’ll go to the police.’

‘No, you won’t. I’ll have you classed as an unfit mother. Those pills you take for your panic attacks? You’ll be lucky to stay out of a mental institution once I’ve finished with you. We’re married until death us do part, Kelly.’

‘You’re having an affair. You’re cheating on me!’

‘Sylvie is irrelevant. This is about you – and me.’ He spat on the plate of the iron and the water bounced away in crazy bubbles of heat.

‘Christos, please.’ She felt tears of frustration and heartache well inside her. ‘There is no you and me. We don’t know each other any more.’

‘You don’t know me? What a fucking joke. Of course you don’t know me – I protected you from the reality of what it costs to cling to wealth and power. You should thank me, not abandon me.’

‘I’ve tried, I’ve really tried to make this marriage work, but I can’t go on any longer—’

‘Can’t go on. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve survived the death of your child. I
know
you can keep going.’

He was right. She had survived the worst that life could throw at a mother. And as a mother she realised that she was programmed to do one thing above all others: protect her children. She had failed at that once before, she wouldn’t again. She turned to the door. She was going to go downstairs, pick up the bag and walk out of the door with the kids. She would call his bluff, wait for him to calm down, but he whirled round with a force she hadn’t been expecting and threw her to the floor. She was stunned, the breath knocked out of her. She lay on her back looking up, thinking here was the line that he had casually crossed and she had no idea what lay beyond it.

He picked up the iron, the tendons in his forearm standing proud like ropes. For a moment she actually looked round for the shirts, and then a second later she understood how bad it could really be.

Two Weeks Later

K
elly glanced at the security camera in the corner of the bedroom. The fisheye lens stared back at her, unmoving, like a bully at school. She looked away. Her image was being relayed and stored on tapes in ‘security control’, a machine that had been set up in the office. It collected images from fifteen cameras that surveyed every room, noting movement, the comings and goings of family life, butting in on secrets and confidences. Christos was paranoid about security, fearful that the world wanted to take away what he had worked so hard for. The flat had been built with a complicated alarm system and security cameras by the two lifts, one that led to the garage and the other that doubled as the front door, but the day after she had asked for a divorce a workman had arrived and installed nine more cameras, in every room, covering every angle. Now she was never more than seven steps from a camera. Christos said it was for her safety and protection, for the sake of the children, but he never explained why it was necessary or who she was to be protected from. She knew it was to keep tabs on her, and her alone.

She leaned over the dressing table and stared in the mirror, smearing foundation across her cheeks with jabbing little strokes. She paused and assessed. The coverage wasn’t thick enough. She put on another layer then picked up an eye pencil and got to work. She could hear Florence and Yannis playing in the corridor outside the bedroom. They were racing scooters, scraping the small protruding bit of wall outside her studio and slamming into the entrance lift doors. Her mother-in-law, Medea, ordered them to put the scooters away. The cloakroom door banged open and shut and the padding little steps of seven-year-old Yannis faded. He had been dressed in a sailor suit by Medea, even though he’d wailed and protested at such a sartorial insult. But Christos wanted to parade their children in front of their guests and what Christos wanted, he got.

The doorbell rang, a harsh, penetrating sound. There would be a waitress waiting with a tray of drinks by the doors that were painted to look like the moulded oak of a grand country house but slid apart to reveal the lift. That was their lives all over, Kelly thought. Pretending to be something they’re not, painted to give the illusion of something else entirely. Her hand shook as she brushed eyeshadow across one of her lids.

The flat was filling with chatter and laughter, the doorbell buzzing over and over. Undulating tones of excitement and admiration, the clack-clack of stilettos ascending the curving staircase. A small party for eighty, Christos had said. There would be champagne and canapés and staff.

A low, coarse laugh penetrated the bedroom door and Kelly scowled. Sylvie had arrived and was being greeted by Medea. Sylvie managed to bring out a warmth, a joy, even, in her mother-in-law that was beyond Kelly’s talents. Kelly applied lipstick, decided on another layer and then brushed her hair. Sylvie was now chatting to Florence, bombarding her with questions. Florence’s answers were inaudible. Her shy and quiet eleven-year-old daughter would be wilting under the scrutiny of adults she didn’t know.

She took off her bathrobe and put on a plain black dress. She glanced out of the bedroom window, the skyline of Bloomsbury and central London laid out before her, the entrance to the hotel at St Pancras directly beneath them, the Euston Road far below, only the faintest hum of traffic audible through the double-glazed windows. A pigeon came to rest on one of the eleven black metal spikes that decorated the windowsill. Even this high up the Victorians hadn’t scrimped on the Gothic splendour of the building. One of the bird’s feet was contorted into a stump, lending it an awkward hobble. It looked too tired to bother to fly away. Kelly knew just how it felt.